Last August, we united with Porkbusters.org and GOP Progress to unmask the senator who was holding up a bill introduced by Sens. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Tom Coburn (R-OK) to create a public, searchable database of all federal grants and contracts.
For days, we worked the phones and gathered responses that hundreds of TPMm readers had received from senators’ offices, eventually eliminating 98 senators as being behind the hold. And indeed, there turned out to be not one, but two pork-happy senators behind the hold: Sens. Ted Stevens (R-AK) and Robert Byrd (D-WV). (The two didn’t seem to appreciate the irony of holding up a government transparency bill in a singularly nontransparent way.) After being unmasked, the senators lifted their holds and the bill sailed through to passage.
Well, this morning, FedSpending.gov finally launched.